Contact Us

If you have questions or comments and would like to contact us, you may do so by calling (916)669-8491 or filling out the form below.

Hi, before you fill out the contact form for our Sacramento recycling program I want to take a minute to tell you about how Set It Aside started and how designers, account managers, and bookkeepers got into the business of collecting aluminum cans, glass bottles, and plastic containers.

I was an account manager working with the marketing firm that would soon change directions in a way that nobody saw coming. I would help clients with websites, printing, and promotional items and though I wasn’t really fulfilled by my job, I really enjoyed the people I was working with and the customers I worked for.

It wasn’t uncommon that Joey would call a meeting to tell us about some new product or service that we were going to start offering, or something that would be changing the way our Sacramento marketing firm did business. There were so many meetings that many became a hazed. However I will never forget this meeting because it was the last meeting our marketing company would ever have.
A few days prior Joey had been recluse in his office but would pop out to do unusual things. Grabbing aluminum cans and plastic bottles from our desks and weighing them, asking me what my wife and I did with our recyclables, faxing quote requests out to Sacramento recycling companies. In all honesty, I had come to not ask him what he was doing because, well, he would tell you. It was better to let the master chef do his cooking and simply wait for the entrée.

Then came the meeting. As usual, he hit the conference all button on his phone and called the entire staff to the conference table. We all made our way to the table, buzzing and joking about what was going to change now. We even had a small pool going on what the meeting would be about. Joey was a brilliant marketer, but every now and then would bring up something that would make us cock our heads sideways like a dog hearing a strange noise. When he came to his seat with a handful of aluminum cans and an oddly resolved look on his face, eyebrows were raised to say the least.

Then he said something that would assure nobody in the betting pool was getting paid on.

“I’m shutting down the marketing firm.”

I can honestly tell you that at first, nobody believed him. The company had won awards, he had won awards, we were profitable as far as we knew. Why on earth would he even joke about something like this? But he wasn’t joking.

He told us about a client who had visited him and a business idea that came to his head that he realized couldn’t be ignored. The company would essentially be a Sacramento recycling middle man who would pick up recyclables, get the best prices from state certified recycling centers that were locally owned and scrap yards, and pay the customers directly. The company would even go beyond aluminum cans and would go into product that most people currently weren’t getting paid for. He showed us how it would help the struggling economy by keeping more money local and in the hands of the people, while lightening the burden on the environment.
Fidgeting with the aluminum cans in front of him he waited for a response. Some of us thought he was joking until we saw that his facial expression wasn’t changing. He let us know that we could either come with him, get jobs on our own, or go our own separate way before concluding the meeting.

The office was uncharacteristically silent. I sat in my cubicle and relived the whole meeting over and over. At one point all I could see was his fingers rocking those aluminum cans as he talked about his vision on changing Sacramento and the economy through recycling.
I was about to get on the internet and post up my resume’ when I looked at the picture of my daughter. She was learning about the environment in school. I thought about how her school was struggling and my angel means more to me than anything. So if helping the environment, the schools, and the economy while working with a bunch of people who are more like family than anything else is a bad option, what the heck was I looking for?

So now I work in a Sacramento Recycling program helping people, schools, non profits, organizations, the economy, and the environment. I went from a white collar to a green collar and I’m never looking back.